English

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4 chain dogfish (Scyliorhinus retifer)

Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From dog +‎ fish. Compare Greek σκυλόψαρο (skylópsaro, dogfish), Latin canicula (dogfish, literally little dog), Italian pescecane (dogfish), French chien de mer (literally dog of the sea), German Meerhund (literally seadog) and Hundfisch (dogfish), and English seadog. For non-Indo-European cognates, see Maltese kelb il-baħar (literally dog of the sea) and Turkish köpek balığı (shark), likely calques from Indo-European languages.

Noun

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dogfish (plural dogfish or dogfishes)

  1. Any of various small sharks
    • 1995 December 26, William J. Broad, “Creatures of the Deep Find Their Way to the Table”, in The New York Times[1]:
      Off the United States, the National Marine Fisheries Service is helping industry explore fisheries for deep shrimp, rattails, chimeras, orange roughy, smoothheads, slackjaw eels, blue hake, skates and dogfish, which the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group, in an effort to improve their marketability, has renamed cape shark.
    1. Especially those from the family Squalidae
    2. A catshark, any shark from family Scyliorhinidae
    3. A kitefin shark, any shark from family Dalatiidae
    4. (UK) Scyliorhinus canicula or Scyliorhinus stellaris
    5. (Azores Is.) Scyliorhinus canicula
    6. (Canada) Squalus suckleyi
    7. (Bermuda) Mustelus canis
    8. (Barbados) Bodianus rufus
    9. (Guyana) Ginglymostoma cirratum or Mustelus canis
    10. (Trinidad and Tobago) Ginglymostoma cirratum
    11. (Namibia) Squalus acanthias, Squalus blainville, Squalus megalops, or Squalus mitsukurii
  2. (US) The bowfin, Amia calva.

Synonyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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See also

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Further reading

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